Minimum job price & travel-time calculator

The hour you bill is not the hour the job costs you

Take a job with an hour on site, a 40-minute round trip, 15 minutes to set up and pack the van, and 20 minutes spent writing the quote and the invoice. That’s 2h 15m of a job you were about to bill for one hour of. The other hour and a quarter still happened — it just didn’t show up on the invoice, which means whatever price got quoted had to cover all of it, not just the part with tools in hand. At $65 an hour the true minimum comes out well above what an hour’s labor alone would suggest, and the gap is exactly the time nobody sees on the invoice.

What actually counts as unpaid time

None of it looks like idle time from the inside — it just doesn’t get its own line on the invoice. The drive there and back. Setting up and loading the van again after. The supplier run for the part you didn’t have on the truck. Writing the quote in the first place, then the invoice once the work is done, then a follow-up message if it runs late. Every one of those minutes is real, and a small job has fewer billable hours to spread that cost across than a big one does — which is exactly why the smallest jobs are the ones most likely to quietly lose money.

Whether that time is really uncovered, though, depends on how you built your rate. Work one out by dividing a yearly target across only the hours you can invoice and the unbillable time is already priced into it — feed that figure in above and the minimum comes out too high, because the drive and the paperwork get paid for twice. The note under the rate field says how to convert it. What the math here assumes is the simpler reading: the rate is what you want to clear for every hour the job occupies, which is how most people read a labor rate on an invoice.

Three ways to make a small job pay

None of these require charging more per hour — they’re about where the fixed cost of showing up gets recovered:

• A minimum charge. Set a floor under every job, so a fifteen-minute fix still covers the drive and the paperwork around it, rather than being priced as if the visit itself was free.
• A call-out fee, credited against the work. State it up front, and take it off the total if the job goes ahead — it covers a wasted trip without feeling like an extra charge on the jobs that do proceed.
• Batching by area or day. Group jobs that are close together or on the same street, and the travel minutes in this calculator drop for every job in the batch, not just the first one.

When the answer is no

Sometimes the honest number this calculator gives back is simply more than the job is worth taking on — too far to drive for too little on-site time, or a price the client was never going to accept. Turning it down cleanly — with a clear reason — costs a lot less goodwill than a vague maybe that goes quiet. The polite-decline script in the new-inquiry templates covers exactly that message, so saying no still leaves the door open for the next one.

Common questions

Should I charge for travel time?

Somehow it has to be paid for, whether that’s a separate travel line, folded into a call-out fee, or baked into your hourly rate — the drive doesn’t stop costing you time just because it isn’t named on the invoice. This calculator counts it as part of the job’s real time so you can see the effect and decide how to charge for it, not whether to.

Which hourly rate should I put in?

The one you want to clear for every hour the job takes you — for most trades that’s the labor rate that goes on the invoice. It isn’t the same number as a billable-hour rate: a rate built by dividing a yearly target across only the hours you can invoice is already grossed up to carry your travel and admin, so putting it in here counts that time twice and the minimum comes out too high. If that’s the figure you’ve got, divide the annual revenue target behind it by all the hours you work in a year instead.

What’s a fair minimum charge for a small job?

There’s no market number to quote here — it falls out of your own rate and your own typical trip, not a published rate anyone else’s job would use. Run your numbers through the calculator above and treat what comes out as your minimum for a job like this one.

Does the time spent quoting and invoicing actually count?

Yes — writing the quote, sending the invoice, and chasing it if it runs late all take real minutes on every job, even though none of that shows up as billable time on the invoice itself. Leave it out of the math and every small job quietly subsidizes your own paperwork.

Will a call-out fee put people off?

Less than finding out about one after the visit does. State it up front, before you’re on site, and most people accept paying something for a tradesperson to show up — the pushback tends to come from a fee nobody mentioned, not one they were told about in advance. See the call-out fee glossary entry for the wording.